Tantau Systems Inc, the new company formed out of Tandem Computer Systems Inc’s German Tektonic research unit (CI No 3,654) has moved into early beta testing with its InfoCharger data analysis tool. According to Tantau’s CEO John Sims, InfoCharger is a high performance data analysis engine that operates at internet speed, or some 100 to 1,000 times faster than traditional database management systems.
Sims describes the company’s forthcoming InfoCharger data analysis tool in these terms. If you take an SQL database, there might be millions of rows and a couple of hundred of attributes to each row. Only five, ten or 20 of those rows might be important to you. InfoCharger turns an SQL database ‘on its side’ so that attribute equals row and row equals attribute. You are suddenly dealing with much less data. The data is read into main memory and manipulated at memory speeds, to further speed things up, says Sims.
Tantau has its eye on the internet service provider market, and claims the product, in conjunction with its web application server and Krypton application integration technology, will be useful for real-time web usage analysis and audit analysis. This is sometimes referred to as clickstream analysis – the click-by-click tracking of the behavior of web site visitors – and can be used for targeted marketing and personalization on e-commerce enabled web sites.
Meanwhile Angara Database Systems Inc, the main memory database company commercializing research work originally carried out at Stanford University, said its Angara Data Server is now generally available. Palo Alto-based Angara also expects to win business from e-commerce, financial analysis and clickstream analysis. TimesTen Performance Software Inc, of Mountain View, California, is a third player in this market, and launched its first main memory database products in April 1998.
